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A little more than a year ago, after running a successful pop-up called Ha’s Đặc Biệt, the chefs Sadie Mae Burns and Anthony Ha opened Ha’s Snack Bar, an itsy-bitsy restaurant on the Lower East Side. The Snack Bar, like the pop-up, served Vietnamese-inspired dishes that were clever, cheffy (and more than a bit French-inflected), and utterly cool without any sort of hauteur. From just about the instant it opened, the place became a monstrous hit—dramatically, fervidly, almost disorientingly. Enormous crowds gathered outside the Broome Street storefront in the hope of being chosen to occupy a spare stool. Social media was relentless, traditional media breathless. (When Burns and Ha learned, around this time last year, that I would be reviewing the Snack Bar, they very politely reached out to ask if I could please not.) Still, from the beginning, they were clear that the Snack Bar was just a first step on their brick-and-mortar journey—not their “real” restaurant, as such, but a staging ground from which to figure out a grander opening to come. Now, exactly twelve months later, they’ve opened Bistrot Ha, just around the corner.

The new place is small, by most measures, though vastly larger than the Snack Bar, with a dozen marble-topped tables that tend to be populated by interesting-looking people wearing blunt bobs and enviable knitwear. As at Ha’s Snack Bar, the food is an elegant wallop of neon flavors, foregrounding the punctilious greenness of Vietnamese herbs and the languorous funk of organ meats and offcuts, but now there’s room to breathe, to relax a little, to take it all in, to linger. There’s a neat stainless-steel bar running along one wall at which you could, in theory, nurse a glass of some minerally Old World red, or a ballet-pink lychee cosmo, though for the moment its seats are all given over to diners having a full meal. There’s even a coat check, by Jove! And unlike the Snack Bar, whose alcove-like kitchen runs on just a hot plate and an electric oven, Bistrot Ha has a more built-out setup, allowing Ha and Burns to sear and broil and finish dishes à la minute to their hearts’ content. The relationship between the two spaces reminds me of the way chic Parisian restaurants sometimes operate accessory caves à vin—more casual wine bars, often sharing the same kitchen but serving noshier food. One Burns-Ha restaurant is a snack bar, and the other’s a bistro(t), and the existence of each allows the other to be more unadulteratedly itself.

The chefs Anthony Ha and Sadie Mae Burns.

One of my favorite Bistrot dishes—braised leeks standing upright in a sauce gribiche so chunky that it’s nearly egg salad—was also one of the best I had on my first visit to the Snack Bar, though the columns of leek have been updated with a finial of marinated mussels. A pho-spiced French-onion soup that I saw on the menu at the Bistrot one week was, by the next, moved around the corner to the Snack Bar. Burns explained to me, on the phone, that the dish just felt more right there, and I don’t know exactly why, but I get it completely. They’ve ported over, in the opposite direction, their signature vol-au-vent, which was once the centerpiece of the Snack Bar menu but is much more at home in the romantic light of the Bistrot. It involves a buttery bowl of puff pastry filled with an ever-changing array of fricassées; I relished one with tender hunks of stewed lamb shoulder in a grass-green sauce made of lime leaf and mint, equally reminiscent of British Sunday roasts and South Asian braises, though, another time, the pastry contained a take on shaking beef (a Vietnamese stir-fry also known as bò lúc lắc), with chewy steak and bits of onion, evocative mostly of week-night takeout.

The daily specials tend to take the form of big hunks of meat—a mammoth pork chop one evening, strewn, Portuguese-ishly, with clams; a brawny steak another, sized to feed two or three. I don’t think you’d be unhappy if you ordered them, but main courses of that scale tend to hog the spotlight (not to mention diners’ stomach space), and it would be such a sadness to miss out on the chance to sample the rest of the menu, with all its wit and weirdness. Burns and Ha play, so warmly, with reference, synthesizing and hybridizing: take the winky General Ha’s Fried Pig Trotter, featuring two marshmallow-soft pillows of meat and fat and connective tissue inside a crispy exterior, doused in an awfully familiar tart, ketchupy, sugary glaze. In their idiosyncratic take on tuna carpaccio, the paillettes of raw fish are sliced considerably thicker than you might expect so that the seafood’s sweet salinity isn’t lost against a sticky-sweet sauce sharpened with fiery slivers of pickled pepper. Vitello tonnato, a famously understated dish of cold meat under a silken sauce made from tuna, gets audaciously remade with paper-thin slices of pork loin, finished with a dark swirl of chile crisp so spicy it brought tears to my eyes. Some dishes were less swaggering but no less appealing: the savoy-cabbage wrapping of a domelike chou farci was filled with a boudin-meets-lion’s-head-meatballs mixture of pork and shrimp and rice, which had an almost maternal softness, its gentle flavors coaxed just to brightness by a spiced broth ladled over top.

Bistrot Ha is small by most measures, with a dozen tables and a bar along one wall.

The menu at Bistrot Ha changes weekly, at minimum, reflecting Burns and Ha’s restless “both and” approach to cooking. The duo has drawn inspiration for Bistrot Ha from Paris’s legendary Bistrot Paul Bert, which once upon a time hosted a pop-up of Ha’s Đặc Biệt. There’s a characteristic nonchalance, a well-earned confidence in the restaurant’s power to delight. I loved an appetizer of fried sheets of yuba layered, napoleon-like, with a tangy paste of shrimp and spices, and soaked in fish sauce; its interleaving of flavors and techniques seemed to harmonize with the dessert menu’s dramatic ice-cream bombe, a spherical Baked Alaska featuring assorted strata of glacés, sherbets, and sorbets (ginger and lime leaf, on a recent visit) under pointy peaks of gooey torched meringue.

I swung by the Snack Bar a few days ago and was surprised to note that, though it’s still plenty packed, it isn’t quite the mob scene it once was. Burns and Ha have removed some of the table seating, to allow for more bodies in the room, and to play up the snacky vibe. All fevers break eventually; what used to be a frenzy seems to have settled into something more sustainable, more livable. What’s here, and there—at the Bistrot and at the Snack Bar—feels better, richer, more humane. On the menu at both restaurants is Ha’s rustic pâté, served by the slice, each piece dotted with white bits of lardo and topped with fat raisins plumped up in a vinegary, fish-sauce-spiked agrodolce. The dish is ostensibly an interpretation of mắm chưng, a steamed Vietnamese meat loaf made with pork and fermented fish, though to tell the truth I couldn’t pick up anything besides a very French pâté de campagne. Still, it’s a marvellous piece of work: dense and jiggly and alive with spices, just as at home on the marble tabletops of the Bistrot as it is on the narrow counters of the Snack Bar. The pâté, like many of Bistrot Ha’s dishes, is served with a wedge of baguette so airy and crackly that I was shocked to learn it’s the same Balthazar Bakery loaf I pick up regularly from my local grocery store. Context, it turns out, is everything. ♦

Gisèle Pelicot was sitting by a tennis court in October, 2020, watching her granddaughter hit forehands, when she saw that she’d missed a call. When she called back, a police officer named Laurent Perret asked if she was aware that a few weeks earlier her husband, Dominique, had been questioned by the police. A security worker at a supermarket had caught him filming under three women’s skirts with his cellphone. Gisèle, feeling a small sense of victory, explained to Perret that she already knew. She had told Dominique, “What you did was ridiculous,” and urged him to see a therapist and apologize to the women. “I forgave him, because I know it’s not like him,” she later told Perret. “I told him that we had to face this situation together.”

The Pelicots lived in a one-story yellow house with pale-blue shutters and a swimming pool, in Mazan, a village in Provence. They had moved there from Paris, seven years before, when Gisèle retired. A few weeks after Perret’s phone call, they drove to the police station for an appointment with him. Dominique wore dark-green corduroy trousers and a pink polo shirt that Gisèle had picked out the night before. “Don’t worry, it’s only a formality,” she reassured him.

Gisèle, who was sixty-seven, was taken into a private room, where Perret asked her about their marriage. “It was love at first sight,” she responded. She and Dominique had met when they were eighteen. They’d been together for forty-nine years. “He is kind and thoughtful,” she told Perret, according to the interview transcript. “He’s a great guy, we get along well, which is why we’re still together. He’s not perfect, but those are his main qualities.” When Perret asked about her social life, she said that she and Dominique were close with a couple whom they’d known for more than twenty years. “We share the same values: family, grandchildren,” she said.

Perret asked if she and her husband had ever been interested in swinging.

“No, how awful,” she responded. “I need feelings. I’m not an open woman.”

Gisèle sensed Perret’s embarrassment. He told her that he’d found evidence that Dominique had been giving her sleeping pills, mixed into her drinks, so that men could rape her. “Do you think this is plausible?” he asked.

She began crying. “It’s not possible,” she said.

He showed her photographs that he’d found on her husband’s memory cards and computer, which had been confiscated after he was caught at the supermarket. “Do you recognize the female wearing a garter belt, lying on the bed and appearing to be asleep?” he asked.

“Yes, that’s me, it’s my bedroom,” she said. “I never sleep like that.” She was struck by how floppy her cheek was. She told Perret, “I don’t know where I am anymore.”

He showed her another photo, of a man in her bedroom with graying hair and a tattoo. “Do you recognize this location?” he asked.

“Who is this guy?” she said. “I never wanted to have sex with him.”

When he mentioned a Skype username that her husband had used to communicate with her rapists, she said, “You’re speaking Chinese to me.”

Perret asked if she wanted to press charges. Her husband, he explained, had kept a list of more than fifty people in the past decade who’d raped her while she was unconscious. The thought of pressing charges hadn’t occurred to Gisèle, but she said yes.

An officer drove Gisèle home while Dominique stayed at the police station. “I got caught up in a vicious cycle,” he confessed. “I realized that, with sleeping pills, it was very easy to get what I wanted, which I couldn’t get otherwise, which was normal, because it wasn’t her way of life.” He said that he had ruined his family. He was disgusted with himself. “I had fantasies that gradually came true, and I wanted to take them further,” he said.

When Gisèle got home, she put a load of laundry into the washing machine. Then she asked her closest friend in Mazan to come over. As she waited, she hung Dominique’s boxers and pajamas on a clothesline in her garden. It was good that the sun was out, she thought—his clothes would dry quickly. She did some ironing and vacuumed the bedrooms.

The next morning, her three children—David, Caroline, and Florian—came from Paris to the police station to meet with Perret, who filled them in on his investigation. As Gisèle drove with them back to Mazan, she felt relieved that there was leftover pumpkin soup in the refrigerator that she could serve for dinner. But her children were not interested in sitting down for a meal. Caroline, who was forty-one and a communications manager, said that the house suddenly looked uglier and older, and she no longer liked the smell. She and her brothers started going through her father’s drawers, where they discovered unpaid bills. A few hours later, Perret called Caroline and asked her to return to the station. He realized that he’d recognized her face. At the station, an officer showed her two photographs of her asleep in bed. In both pictures, she was lying on her side, her underwear exposed. “It should be noted that Mme. Caroline Pelicot is shaking and informs us that she feels very ill,” the officer wrote. “Let us suspend the meeting.”

When Caroline returned to the house, she later wrote, her mother looked up at her “casually, as if I’d just come back from a pleasant walk.” David, the oldest child, who works in marketing, had always credited his father with giving him “a good education, values, a backbone.” He told me, “I decided very quickly to erase this man from my memory.” He and Florian put Dominique’s belongings in trash bags, and drove to the dump. They made ten trips. Caroline destroyed framed photographs and art on the walls, as well as a trunk of family photo albums. “I think my mother resented me for that—for being in that kind of frenzy,” Caroline said later. Gisèle remembers telling Caroline, “Don’t break everything, please. There are things I’d like to keep.” Of all her children, Caroline was the one that Gisèle struggled with the most. “She’s one of those highly strung people who love and lose their temper in the same breath,” Gisèle writes in her new memoir, “A Hymn to Life.” “She seems to have been filled since childhood with a feeling of insecurity that I have never really understood or been able to soothe.”

As a child, Caroline considered her father “more motherly than my mother,” she said. She described him as a “dad who listened, who came to see me in my room, who sat on the edge of my bed and said, ‘But, Caroline, you can’t say that—you can’t behave like that.’ ” He helped all three of his children with their homework, played soccer with them, and cooked for the family. After Caroline had her own child, she and her husband, Pierre, spent a few weeks every summer with her parents. In the evenings, they drank cocktails and played Trivial Pursuit and sometimes stayed up until 1 A.M. talking. “I adored this man,” Pierre said later. Florian’s wife, Aurore, was similarly struck by the family’s rapport. “I remember telling my husband that they were U.F.O.s,” she said. “I, who came from a complicated family with taboos, arrived in a loving, demonstrative family. For me, it was a bit like the ideal family.”

Caroline didn’t want to spend the night alone; she asked her mother to sleep in the guest bedroom with her. “Would it have made things easier if I had snuggled up to my daughter, if we had stayed up all night talking?” Gisèle writes. But she felt an urgent need to be alone, in her own room—“the scene of rape, but still my bed.” In the morning, they discussed the two photos of Caroline, who thought she may have also been raped. “Though I understood her suspicions,” Gisèle writes, “I couldn’t let them become certainties.” When she asked Caroline if she was sure that the woman in the pictures was her, Caroline felt that her mother didn’t believe her.

The three children decided that their mother could no longer live in the house. After spending three days cleaning it out, they all took a train to Paris; Gisèle was to stay with her children, taking turns at each of their homes. David remembers looking at his mother at the train station and realizing that, “of her former life, all that remained was a suitcase and her dog.” Gisèle felt like a twenty-year-old girl. “I understood that they wanted to erase that whole part of their lives,” she told me. “But, if the last fifty years of my life were taken away from me, it would be very difficult for me to continue to live.”

Gisèle’s children Caroline and David arrive at the courtroom to hear the verdict in the trial.Photograph by Alexandre Dimou / Reuters

“You have to know where you come from to know where you’re headed,” Dominique wrote, nine years before his arrest, in a thirty-page autobiography that he titled “With My Own Troubles.” He gave copies to Gisèle and his children. “I think of the day when I’ll no longer be here, and my family will learn about my past, which will undoubtedly help them grow in the love and shared values that I’ve tried to pass on to them,” he wrote.

The autobiography was written in a jolly tone (“Life in Paris for a ‘country bumpkin’ is no piece of cake, believe me”), with an emphasis on the joys of soccer. But Dominique also described his father as “authoritarian,” a “wolf,” and a “predator lurking in the shadows,” and his mother as “too submissive and unable to leave.” He devoted several passages to a “bad arrival” in the family—the adoption of a child named Nicole, who had lived in foster homes. His father “took advantage of the situation to satisfy his needs with what he had at his disposal,” Dominique wrote. After Dominique’s mother died, his father and Nicole, who was then in her early twenties, began sharing a bedroom: “I understand that a man can have needs, but not in this way.” Each time he explored a dark subject, though, he wrapped it up quickly—“But let’s move on” or “That’s life.” The narrative ends when he meets Gisèle: “The rest will be easy for us. We were happy and had many children, as the saying goes.” The last words of the memoir are “THANK YOU, LIFE.”

Dominique had been an electrician and then a real-estate agent, but he was often out of work and short on money. Gisèle started her career as a secretary at France’s main power company and was repeatedly promoted; she was surprised to eventually find herself in an executive position, supporting her family. She cared more about style and culture than Dominique did—when she took him to “Madama Butterfly,” he was bored for three hours—but they shared a sense of humor. “There was a lot of irony,” Caroline said. “Whatever happened in our family life, we could still laugh about it.” They held parties for friends in their basement, which had a disco ball hanging from the ceiling. “I never saw him leer at a woman,” Caroline said, of her father. “He never made inappropriate, out-of-line jokes.”

“Wow! It’s like in every movie I’ve ever seen.”

Cartoon by Frank Cotham

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When Gisèle and Dominique were having sex, Gisèle writes, he occasionally called her “my bitch.” The erotic cliché struck her as absurd. When he asked her to get a Brazilian wax, she said no. She would have been happy to just rest her head on his chest at night, but he preferred to have sex, and she settled into it, about five times a month. Sometimes she even felt desire. Once, in a department store in Paris, she had to choose between two different pairs of underwear, because she could only afford one. Without her realizing it, Dominique stole the pair she’d left behind, slipping it into his pocket, but a security guard caught him. Gisèle said that the salesperson was touched by the gesture, telling her, “Madame, you mustn’t be cross with your husband.”

One of Gisèle’s closest friends had been a colleague nine years her junior, a single woman named Pascale, who often went on vacation with the Pelicots. Pascale considered Dominique “very helpful, friendly, and fun-loving.” Eventually, she said, he began hitting on her; once, on vacation, when she was alone, crying about a breakup, he embraced her and said, “I’ve been dreaming about this for so long.” At work, Pascale tried to confide in Gisèle, telling her, “You don’t know who you’re living with. You put him on a pedestal.” But Gisèle didn’t ask Pascale what she meant. She couldn’t tolerate the suggestion. She stopped acknowledging Pascale when they passed in the hallway. “I suffered greatly from this breakup,” Pascale said.

Now, after spending several weeks living with Florian, Gisèle called Pascale, with whom she hadn’t spoken in two decades, and told her what had happened. Pascale invited her to spend the weekend at her house. They stayed up until five in the morning talking. “We picked up where we left off, as if we had only been apart for a day,” Gisèle told me. She wanted to know what Pascale had been trying to tell her years earlier—she thought that it might foretell Dominique’s crimes. But all Pascale had was an ordinary story of a “cheating husband playing footsie with his wife’s younger friend,” as Gisèle put it. Her children felt alienated when she tried to remind them that they’d had a good childhood, and Gisèle was comforted that, for Pascale, positive memories of the Pelicots still felt alive. “To her, we were a model couple,” she told me.

Six weeks after Dominique’s arrest, Gisèle met with an investigative magistrate, Gwenola Journot, who would be interviewing everyone involved in the case. Gisèle referred to Dominique as “my husband” before stopping herself. “No,” she said. “I can’t say ‘my husband’ anymore.” She started calling him “the other one” or “he.” She was in the process of getting a divorce. “The saddest thing is that I thought we were happy,” she said.

Gisèle had no memories of being raped. But, after she and Dominique moved to Mazan, she’d begun having a recurring dream, which now took on new significance. “I was at our gate, on the terrace, and I saw two officers,” she told me. “I approached them and asked them what they wanted, and they told me it was about a complaint concerning a woman and Monsieur Pelicot. I didn’t understand this dream. So maybe my subconscious was giving me an answer, but I didn’t grasp it.”

She told Journot, “The puzzle has fallen into place.” Once, she explained, Dominique had handed her a beer that seemed to have a green tinge. She thought that he should return it to the store, but instead he immediately poured it down the sink. Another time, shortly after their move, she noticed a bleach-like stain on her new pair of yellow cotton pants. “I thought to myself, This is strange, because I have an excellent memory, and here I was, unable to remember what had happened the night before,” she said to Journot. She had asked Dominique, teasingly, “You wouldn’t have drugged me by any chance, would you?” He started crying, and she apologized.

Sometimes days would pass, and Gisèle couldn’t remember whom she had talked to or what she had done. She had been nine years old when her mother, who had a brain tumor, died. “When I had these periods of absence,” she told me, “I thought that I had the same illness as my mother, and that I could also just vanish.” Her father, a professional soldier, had remarried, to a cold woman who said things like “Life’s a shit sandwich, and you take a little bite of it every day.” Gisèle remembered her mother smiling as she died, and Gisèle took care to live that way, too: cheerful even when doomed. Her father never appeared to recover from his grief, and her older brother fell into depression. But Gisèle described herself as a “steadfast tin soldier of joy.”

She had seen three neurologists about the memory lapses, with Dominique accompanying her, but they couldn’t determine what was wrong. They seemed to view her, Gisèle thought, as just another old lady in decline. “All three told me the same thing,” she said to Journot. “ ‘You have an anxious disposition.’ ” One of Dominique’s brothers, Joël, a doctor who had been the mayor of his town, concluded that she was fatigued from all the time she spent taking care of her grandchildren in Paris. She went there any time they had a school vacation. Joël compared her to a vacuum-cleaner bag stuffed to capacity. “They reassured me with the vacuum cleaner,” she explained. (Joël declined to comment.)

Caroline chose a lawyer for the family, Caty Richard, who was known for her commitment to victims of sexual violence. She read Gisèle and Caroline transcripts of the interrogations of Dominique and the other rapists. They were being arrested in waves of about ten at a time. Dominique had met many of them on Coco, a French messaging site, in a chat room called Without Her Knowledge. At his instruction, they often parked their cars at a school about three hundred feet from the house. They abstained from smoking or wearing cologne; they warmed their hands on a radiator or in hot water and undressed in the laundry room. They left their clothes on the porch so that they could leave quickly if Gisèle woke up. After the rapes, Dominique washed Gisèle and changed her back into her pajamas. “In this way, he erases the traces of his misdeeds and returns to his original position of idealizing his partner,” a court psychiatrist wrote.

Gisèle received the information passively. “Say something!” she remembers Caroline yelling. “Why don’t you say something?” Gisèle writes that Richard advised her, “Pretend you’re suffering. It’ll do her good.” Richard denied using those words, but she did try to help Gisèle and Caroline hear each other, because “they had opposite ways of coping,” she said.

“Keep going, hanging on, putting on a brave face was all I knew how to do, and it was what I wished for my daughter too,” Gisèle recalled. But Caroline found her mother’s approach alienating—a “protection mechanism for her,” she wrote later, “but one I won’t be able to tolerate.”

“In everyone’s eyes, Madame Gisèle Pelicot seemed fulfilled and happy in her marriage,” a psychologist named Marianne Douteau concluded. Another psychologist wrote that Gisèle was “perfectly normal,” though easily influenced. The psychologist cited the fact that, when he handed her a blank sheet of paper and asked her to sign it, she did—an instruction that most people do not follow, he said. But Dominique rejected the suggestion that Gisèle was submissive. He likened her to “a reed—someone who bends but doesn’t break.”

The experts assigned to the case didn’t seem to know what to make of Dominique’s psychology. He “radiated happiness when his family gathered around him,” Douteau wrote. Describing his rigidity and his trouble holding a job, she observed that he “resembles his father in many ways.” But he seemed to resist the thought that he had replicated his parents’ marriage. “During our interview, every anecdote about his father was an opportunity for him to repeat, like a mantra, that he had sworn not to be like his father,” Douteau wrote.

Two psychiatrists reasoned that Dominique’s crimes were possible because he was “splitting.” “This split allows two contradictory personalities to coexist without conflict,” one wrote. “When M. Pelicot operates in one mode, he is unaware of the other.” The second psychiatrist proposed that Gisèle had not sensed Dominique’s other side because “we split with the splitter, so to speak.” We cordon off the parts of our lives that don’t fit the story we believe we are living.

Whether or not a split explained Dominique’s crimes, it seemed to carry over into the family, dividing them, too. Each member ended up with a different version of what had been real. “I admit to everything,” Dominique had said, shortly after being arrested. “The only thing that shocks me a little—my daughter,” he said. “The photos you showed me—the photos mean nothing to me. I never touched my daughter, never.”

Caroline thought that one of the photos had been taken at her parents’ old apartment outside Paris, before the move to Mazan, but she wasn’t sure about the other picture. At first, Dominique told Journot, the magistrate, that he didn’t remember taking the photos. His explanation was disjointed. He remarked that his daughter was the “spitting image of her mother,” and then said, “She looks very young to me compared to the allegations against me today.”

When Journot asked Gisèle what she made of Dominique’s denials about Caroline, she responded, “I don’t have the answer. I don’t have the answer for her.”

In another interview, when Journot raised the subject again, Gisèle said, “As a mother, my personal conviction is that my daughter was not drugged or abused. That is my personal conviction. I am convinced of it. I have discussed it with her, but she insists.” She added, “When you look at my photos and hers, there’s no comparison.” Gisèle appeared essentially dead in the photos, completely limp, but she thought that Caroline’s arms were drawn together as if she were sleeping in the fetal position. They both recalled basic facts about the pictures differently: Gisèle characterized the photos as almost too dark to see, whereas Caroline described a “bedside lamp lighting the scene.”

“Mom and I are becoming distant,” Caroline wrote in December, 2020, in a journal that she later published as a memoir, “I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again.” “It’s inconceivable for her that I, too, might have been one of my father’s victims.” She understood that it was too painful for her mother to contemplate incest, but “I do nonetheless resent the fact that she won’t even consider the possibility and take the time to listen to my anger and pain.” (Caroline declined an interview with me, saying, “It is really too emotional.”)

Dominique was charged with invading Caroline’s privacy by disseminating pictures of her to other men, an allegation he did not contest, but Journot did not find enough evidence to indict him for drugging or raping his daughter. Caroline had not had blackouts or memory loss. Gisèle tried to reassure her that the absence of evidence was a good thing. But, Gisèle wrote, “reassuring her now meant betraying her.”

The rest of the family also began to sift through the past for overlooked clues. Florian, the youngest, told me that, as a child, “I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t very comfortable in my father’s presence. I wonder if, deep down, I sensed that other side of him, indirectly.” A pianist and a standup comedian, Florian had always felt much closer to his mother. “When I tried to have deep discussions with him about psychology and things like that, he always sidestepped a little,” he said. He noticed that his father warded off introspection by using the phrase “Don’t cut the shit into four pieces.”

Florian (left) with his mother. “He will always be my father,” Florian said, of Dominique.Photograph by Laurent Coust / ABACA / Reuters

Florian’s wife, Aurore, told Journot that, years earlier, she had overheard Dominique asking his grandson Nathan, one of David’s children, to play doctor with him. “This sentence from my father-in-law struck me, but I didn’t dare talk about it,” she said. At the time, Aurore was bringing charges of sexual abuse against her own grandfather, a police officer, who was eventually convicted. “I told myself that just because I was going through this myself didn’t mean I had to see evil everywhere,” she said. “I thought that my perception might be biased by what I was going through personally.”

After Dominique’s arrest, Nathan, who was fourteen, began having a recurring nightmare about being sexually assaulted by his grandfather in a car. “For a month, I didn’t say anything, but after a while I couldn’t take it anymore,” he said to me. “I went to see my mother, who told me what Aurore said about the doctor game.” His parents took him to a therapist who specialized in applied kinesiology, a kind of bodywork popular in France, and he started to recall fragments of memories of being abused by Dominique. “Everything happened between my body and the therapist,” he said. “I was thinking about the questions she was asking me, but I wasn’t answering verbally. My body spoke.” Having learned that they couldn’t trust their impressions of their lives, the family turned to a method that bypassed conscious reasoning.

Recovering repressed memories through therapy is an unreliable way of getting at the truth, but Dominique’s crimes had shifted the threshold for belief. In her memoir, Gisèle recalls that, one night at a family dinner, Nathan brought up the recurring nightmare. Gisèle assured Nathan that a dream is not a memory. She didn’t think he should dwell on a scene that might not be real. “I wanted him to move forward, to stay afloat,” she writes. David abruptly cut off the conversation.

In October, 2021, a friend called Gisèle to warn her that her case had been picked up by Le Nouveau Détective, a French tabloid. The cover of the magazine had a yellow banner with the words “THE WORST CASE EVER REVEALED!” Gisèle was referred to by a pseudonym. “I had a very strange reaction, because they were talking about me, but I felt like they were talking about someone else,” she told Journot. She was horrified to “hear the defense lawyers or certain comments in the press saying that I must have realized something, that I must have been pretending to be asleep. And that’s very hurtful. I was lucky that I wasn’t alone, that my friends were there all the time, calling me constantly.”

Caroline had a vacation house on Île de Ré, an island off the west coast of France. To escape the attention, Gisèle decided to rent the house from Caroline. She didn’t know anyone on the island. By then, she had lived with David for three months and Florian for four months, and the arrangements were becoming increasingly untenable. “Their lives were continuing, while mine no longer was,” she told me.

Gisèle put her maiden name, Guillou, on the house’s mailbox. It was the first time she had lived on her own. Tourist season had ended, and the island was nearly deserted. Gisèle spent much of her time “walking—walking to get it all out of my system,” she said. She covered six miles each day, often with her bulldog, Lancôme.

She found a therapist on the island who specialized in trauma. But, when she told her about being raped by dozens of people, she could sense that the therapist thought that she was lying. Finally, Gisèle told her, “Google ‘Mazan,’ you’ll see.” After the therapist saw the headlines, Gisèle assured her that, though it had been painful, everything would be O.K. in the end. She smiled. She could tell that the therapist was confused. “When I came back for a second consultation, she was so intrigued that she asked me to tell her about my childhood,” Gisèle told me. “She wanted to understand why I was still standing.”

During her walks, Gisèle began meeting other people on the island. She was reluctant to move away from safe conversational territory—the breed and age of their dogs, or where on the island they lived. When people asked about her past, she was evasive. As she became closer to one couple, Angèle and Fred, she used the metaphor that she had been “struck head-on by a high-speed train” to explain how she had ended up on the island alone. It was the same phrase she’d used shortly after Dominique’s arrest, when Journot had asked how she felt about her husband. Her new friends didn’t ask for details. Of Gisèle’s ability to attract other people, Florian said, “She’s a bit like the sun.”

“I tend to enjoy a dry Riesling or an unoaked Chardonnay, but I’m also open to a bottle of your second cheapest.”

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For Christmas that year, Caroline and her family wanted the house back for a week. Caroline “asked me to make myself scarce,” Gisèle writes. She looked for a hotel or a mobile home or even a campsite, but everything was booked. “I found myself with nowhere to go,” she writes. Angèle and Fred eventually offered her their own house—they were away and said that she could take care of their cat—and Gisèle spent Christmas alone, eating cheese and toast. It’s one of the most devastating passages of the book: she passes over her daughter’s rejection without comment. Her relationship with David had also frayed; he hadn’t spoken to her in six months. When I asked about her solitude that Christmas, though, she recast it as a necessary blow. “I needed it, because, when you feel that sad, you don’t want to expose yourself,” she said. “So that solitude was a bit like my friend. It was a way of being.”

“Gisèle’s doing well,” Dominique’s older sister, Geneviève, wrote him, shortly after Gisèle moved to the island. “You’re lucky, she only wants to hold on to the good memories with you.” The letter was added to the case file, and Caroline, who spent hours reading the records, was struck by the characterization of her mom. “I couldn’t agree less,” she writes in her memoir. “My mother just wants to hang on to whatever remnants of her previous life she can still grasp.”

A year after Gisèle moved to the island, officers discovered that Dominique’s DNA matched blood that had been collected after an attempted rape, from 1999, that had never been solved. A twenty-year-old real-estate agent who uses the pseudonym Marion had taken a man to view an apartment on the outskirts of Paris. When she showed him one of the bedrooms, he tied her hands behind her back with a cord and covered her mouth with a cloth soaked in a sedative substance. As he removed her clothes, Marion fought back and ran into a closet; she remained locked inside until the man finally left.

Dominique denied any knowledge of the crime. But, when the police told him that his DNA had been found on Marion’s shoe, he asked to pause the interview. “It is indeed me,” he said, when the meeting resumed. But he claimed that it was his decision not to rape Marion. “I had a block thinking that it could be my daughter,” he said. Marion and Caroline were the same age.

Marion’s assault had been linked with a second cold case, from 1991, that the police believed may have been committed by the same person. This one also involved a young real-estate agent showing a man an apartment in Paris. She was raped and strangled to death, and the smell of ether lingered in the apartment. Dominique denied being involved, and this time there was no DNA. The police had mishandled the case, losing evidence. Nevertheless, Dominique was indicted for both crimes.

Gisèle told the officers reinvestigating the cases that she’d never seen unexplained scratches or bruises on her husband. She remembered two evenings, which she believed were in the nineties, when Dominique had come home crying. He told her he’d lost his job, but now she wondered if he was actually upset because he had just assaulted or murdered someone. She’d tried to cheer him up by baking gratin dauphinois, a cheesy potato dish.

After being interviewed about the cases, Gisèle called Pascale, to go over her memories again. Gisèle said that she wished Dominique had confided in her about his urges, because she might have helped him or found him a therapist. In her early thirties, she’d had an affair with a colleague, and she wondered if the crimes had stemmed from Dominique’s sense of abandonment. After finding out, he climbed onto train tracks running over a bridge and almost jumped. The colleague had been “a younger version of me,” Dominique later told a psychiatrist. Pascale interrupted Gisèle, to try to make her understand that what had happened exceeded their marriage. “This was no longer the tragic love story of Gisèle and Dominique,” Gisèle writes.

In Dominique’s telling, though, that story still persisted. “I was nothing before her,” he told Journot. “She made me become someone.” His attorney, Béatrice Zavarro, said that the younger rapists who’d come to his home had become a kind of “sublimating entity”—a way to magnify himself as he aged. “History repeats itself,” Dominique wrote Zavarro in a letter. He had not gone to his father’s funeral, and he knew his children would not go to his. He, too, had tried to get rid of every photo of his father. “I have done no better than the one I hated,” he wrote.

A few weeks after learning about the cold cases, Gisèle watched Richard, her lawyer, discuss her case on a cable-television show called “True Crime Tales.” She was distressed by her lawyer’s tone, which she found coarse. By then, she was living in a small house on the island which was lent to her by new friends, who lived in a larger place on the property. Gisèle felt uncomfortable with how Richard enlisted the case in service of “the great battle between women and men,” she writes. Although Caroline had a legal right to the case file, Gisèle was angry at Richard for letting her spend hours with it, looking at images of her mother’s rapes. After the TV appearance, Gisèle told me, “I couldn’t stand it. I told myself I couldn’t go through with it.” She fired Richard, without a backup plan. She considered going to trial without a lawyer.

One of Gisèle’s neighbors connected her with an attorney named Antoine Camus, who typically handled corporate litigation and white-collar crime. “I was supposed to find someone new for her, but after talking to her I proposed myself,” Camus told me. He asked a friend, Stéphane Babonneau, who had experience with sex crimes, to join him; their work would be funded through legal aid. On his first video call with Gisèle, Babonneau was disoriented by her apparent psychological wellness. “It was as if the magnitude of what she had been through did not appear at all,” he said. Trauma often leaves people feeling like spectators to the harms done to them, but for Gisèle, who had been unconscious, her trauma occupied an even more elusive category of experience. She knew that there were videos of her being raped, but she didn’t want to construct new memories by watching them. “It is beyond my strength,” she had told Perret.

A few months after hiring the new lawyers, Gisèle went out with friends to a restaurant under a large tent where there was live music and dancing. She was seated next to a man named Jean-Loup, a retired flight attendant for Air France. He had a bulldog, too. Her friends had secretly planned to set them up. “I knew a little bit about Gisèle’s story—I had seen a small article in Le Monde—but I didn’t ask her any questions,” Jean-Loup told me. “We talked about everything else. I told her about my life with Bénédicte,” his wife, who had died nine months earlier. “I was still mourning.”

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Their first date was to see the opera “Carmen” on the island, and they kissed as they said goodbye. “I was light-headed with happiness,” Gisèle writes. “I needed to love again. I wasn’t afraid.” She also describes the first night they slept together: “We didn’t even eat. We couldn’t wait.” The evening was “gentle, punctuated by stifled giggles.” Gisèle was seventy, and Jean-Loup was the third man she’d slept with in her life. He had two adult children; they didn’t tell their families they were seeing each other for the first few months. “There was something amusing, even a bit thrilling, in the way we kept our relationship secret, as if we were teenagers and our lives were just beginning,” she writes.

In her rendering, Jean-Loup struggled more with the idea of a new relationship than she did. He had panic attacks and told her, “I feel like I’m cheating on Bénédicte.” But Gisèle appeared to feel an almost metaphysical certainty. In Jean-Loup, she saw confirmation that her story of herself was intact. He had “emerged from a place far from this island: from a formative scene of my childhood, the source of my deepest pain,” she writes. “Jean-Loup was the savior, filling the empty space . . . the abyss.”

Earlier in the book, Gisèle describes her first night with Dominique in the same register. His presence was “a sign, a sign from Maman that she was watching over me,” she writes. “We were lovers and we were twins. We would always be together; our suffering behind us.” Dominique, in his own autobiography, recounts his search for love in similar terms: “I was filling up the void of my loneliness.”

Victims of sexual violence in France have the right to a closed hearing, and Gisèle told Journot that she wanted her trial “held entirely behind closed doors.” The police had determined that at least seventy-two men had assaulted her, but they were able to identify only fifty-three suspects, including Dominique, and two of them had died. The group would be tried in court together. “For my mental health, it seems obvious to me that I should refrain from making any comments, even to the press,” she said to Journot. She intended to be “as discreet as possible.”

To prepare Gisèle for the trial, her lawyers showed her pictures of the courtroom in Avignon where the hearings would be held. She had hoped that Pascale could sit next to her, but Babonneau explained that, because the trial would be closed, she could not have a friend in the room. The defendants would sit in rows, taking up three-quarters of the courtroom, and she would sit about three feet away.

Gisèle had avoided reading her case file, but in early 2024 her lawyers suggested that she confront the evidence by reviewing the writ of indictment, which was four hundred pages long. By then, she was living with Jean-Loup, and he printed out two copies. He read the indictment at the same time, in a different room. Gisèle, who read with a highlighter, noted that one of the rapes had taken place on her sixty-sixth birthday, another on New Year’s Eve, when she and Dominique had planned a quiet night at home. She knew one of the men from the neighborhood. He had always seemed friendly and polite. “I would see him at the bakery,” Gisèle told Journot, “and never imagined that he was raping me.”

She was not the sort of person to use terms like “sexism.” She had never read “The Second Sex,” by Simone de Beauvoir, which was published three years before she was born. When she heard other women talk about the fight for birth control or abortion rights, she didn’t “really grasp what this conflict between men and women was all about,” she writes. But in her conversations with Journot she had become more attuned to injustice. When Journot relayed that one defendant was claiming she was Dominique’s willing accomplice, Gisèle said, “I’m ready to confront him without a problem,” adding, “You tell me he was born in 1984. And it doesn’t bother him coming to rape a grandmother?” When she learned that Dominique had a previous arrest for filming up women’s skirts—he’d been caught in 2010, and she had never been notified—she told Journot, “This is a case of failure to assist a person in danger, and I find it absolutely shocking.” Dominique’s punishment had been a hundred-euro fine.

Jean-Loup and Gisèle, with her lawyers.Photograph by Laurent Coust / ABACA / Reuters

Gisèle wondered whether, by keeping the trial closed, she was protecting the defendants, whose behavior would never be fully known. A private trial would also mean spending weeks in a room, with few witnesses, with dozens of men who had raped her. “Alone with them,” she writes. “Locked in with them.” One day, she went for a long walk through the woods and on the beach, and when she returned she told Jean-Loup, who was setting the table for lunch, that she had changed her mind: she wanted an open trial. “I said, ‘I’m with you,’ ” Jean-Loup told me. “I started from the principle of supporting her, whatever happens.”

With Jean-Loup, Gisèle spent hours rehearsing what she would say in court. “I was in the role of the judge,” he told me. There was so much emotional pressure that “sometimes we laughed,” he said. “We had to let off steam. We tried to make fun out of it.” In Gisèle’s book, she considers the idea that the open hearing felt within reach because she had aged out of sexual visibility. “Maybe the shame lifts once you hit seventy and no one looks at you any more,” she writes. She also wondered if she felt brave because she was happy and in love.

The trial began on September 2, 2024. Gisèle and Jean-Loup rented a house ten miles from the courthouse, large enough for her three children and their families. Caroline had always pushed for the hearings to be public, and, in the months leading up to the trial, she and David became close with their mother again. (Florian had been in steady contact with her.) “They were again whole, though less than before, of course,” Babonneau told me.

Gisèle recalled that, as Dominique entered the courtroom on the first day of the trial, he caught her eye. To Caroline, it seemed that her father “wanted to draw an invisible line to my mother from the glass box where he was sitting.” He had spent the past four years reading more than three hundred books, many of them classic works of French literature. On graph paper, in pencil, he listed the author’s name, the title, the date of publication, and its prizes. Before the trial, he had told Journot that he was eager to take responsibility—“but I’ve never touched a child,” he repeated. “I can’t wait to go to trial to confirm the truth for my children, for my family.”

At the trial, he admitted to all the charges—“I am a rapist, like those in this room,” he said. (Because most French trials are not officially transcribed, I have drawn from contemporaneous court reporting, much of it by Marion Dubreuil, Juliette Campion, and few other young female French journalists who were there almost every day for four months.)

Nearly all the other defendants denied committing a crime. “As long as the man is there, giving me instructions, it’s not rape,” a construction supervisor said. A truck driver proposed that “once a woman is wet, it means she’s not saying no.” A gardener explained that he had penetrated Gisèle “out of politeness, to reciprocate the hospitality of the host.”

While the defendants shirked responsibility, some of their wives tried to take the blame. One woman said that, owing to a complicated pregnancy, she’d refused to have sex with her husband. “The tragedy must have occurred at that time,” she offered.

Another wife said that she had stopped sleeping with her husband after her mother got ill. “It’s not because you refused sexual relations with your husband that he finds himself in this dock today,” Babonneau tried to assure her, at Gisèle’s prompting.

“It’s not because I refused just once,” the woman said, “but for a very long time.”

On the fifth day of the trial, Caroline told the court that she was certain she’d been drugged like her mother. Her husband, Pierre, testified that he’d never seen Caroline sleep in the position in which she appeared in the photos. “For me, the question is not how Caroline, my wife, was drugged,” he said. “It’s why.”

Dominique responded to Pierre: “I only ask that you believe one thing. I have never, ever, ever touched my daughter or my grandchildren.” Caroline remembers her father’s hand trembling. “I take responsibility for the rest,” he said.

A psychologist testified that, when he evaluated Caroline, he had urged her not to become mired in a “relentless quest for knowledge,” because there “will always be doubts, shadows.” Caroline, however, felt that she could get answers from the trial. “ ‘He won’t leave me in pain’—I really believed that,” she said. She felt that her mother had the power to persuade him to confess.

But, when a lawyer for one of the defendants asked Gisèle what she thought of her daughter’s accusations, she said only, “I’m not ruling anything out after seeing the photos of Caroline asleep. You cannot rule anything out.” Later, when a lawyer asked again, she responded, “I prefer not to answer that question.” Caroline stood up and left the courtroom. David followed her.

“I had never felt pain like that before—never with such intensity as during those few suspended minutes, in front of the smug gazes of most of the defense lawyers,” Caroline writes in a second memoir, published after the trial. “I was her only daughter,” she continues. “She should not have let go of my hand.”

On the roads leading to the courthouse, feminist collectives posted collages and posters on the walls:

GISÈLE MASTERFUL

AND INSPIRING

THEY RAPE

BECAUSE THEY DO NOT RESPECT WOMEN

BECAUSE THEY TAKE PLEASURE IN DOMINATION

At a parish in Avignon, at Sunday Mass, a priest prayed for “all those who silently relive their own suffering through Madame Pelicot.” Women carried signs reading “We Are All Gisèle.” As Gisèle walked into the lobby of the courthouse each morning, women applauded and handed her bouquets of flowers.

Journalists praised her elegance. “Her impeccable bob,” a reporter for Le Monde observed. “The elegance of a flowing dress with a midnight-blue print and the twist of camel suede ankle boots. A lively body, a graceful and supple gait, a calm voice.” Another article admired her “nose that points to the moon.” The more attention reporters paid to her clothes, the more care Gisèle took with them. “It was a way of restoring, through my presence, the body that the rapes sought to destroy,” she told me. She kept her relationship with Jean-Loup a secret, to avoid creating a distraction, but he came to the trial every day, often sitting a few rows behind her or on the defendants’ side of the room.

The trial was seen as a referendum on the relations between men and women, but the question of incest drew comparatively little notice. Each week, the court heard testimony from five to seven defendants. Around a third of them said that they’d been sexually abused as children; some had never previously spoken about the experience. As a child, one defendant had slept with his shoes on and kept his windows open so that he could escape when his father came to sexually assault him. When his lawyer asked him how his childhood was, he replied, “Very good.” The lawyer clarified, “He lied to me out of shame.”

The trial also forced into the open the suspected abuse of Dominique’s adopted sister. “I could have, I should have done something, but what?” he had written in his autobiography. “Call the police? To perhaps push my mother even further into misery?”

When his brother Joël testified that their father was not as menacing as Dominique had claimed, Dominique said, “I accuse my brother of having covered for my father for years over the incest against Nicole.” He went on, “The first one who ruined the family was our father. I take responsibility for it, and I will pay. But our father never paid.”

In “The Cradle of Dominations,” the French anthropologist Dorothée Dussy argues that incest is not a closed scene that involves only the victim and the perpetrator but a practice embedded within a family for generations. “Does the practice of incest function like a sport?” Dussy writes. “If you often played soccer with your brother when you were little, playing with him two or three times a week throughout your childhood, would you encourage your sons to play soccer?” The game may have been violent and humiliating, she writes, but it is woven into your understanding of how to be close with another person. “Will soccer have been so important in building your relationship with your brother that it will subconsciously influence what you pass on to your sons?”

Dussy, who attended the trial with a group of colleagues, was struck by how many taboos the public could absorb, and yet, she said, in the courtroom as well as in much of the trial coverage, “the injunction to remain silent about incest” persisted: “Dominique could admit to so much, but not this—not sexualizing the children.”

In October, when the trial was in its eighth week, Caroline shared on Instagram that she had insomnia and was going to a clinic to rest and recover. “My siblings and I are living through a true tsunami that we don’t allow ourselves to talk about, out of respect for our mother,” she wrote. “I have decided to break my silence, above all so that people don’t think I’m a pseudo ‘wonder woman.’ Far from it. . . .”

When Caroline returned, in November, for the final weeks of the trial, she said that the case had made her feel invisible. “Right away I knew I was a victim of Dominique Pelicot, too, but I only thought about one thing—my mother—and not myself,” she said in court. “My mother was raped, yes, under the influence of drugs, yes. The only difference between my mother and me is that in her case there is proof.”

In her memoir, Gisèle writes that Caroline’s repetition of “yes” felt like a blade: “She was cutting her pain from mine, setting the two in opposition.”

When David gave his final statement, he told Dominique, “If you still have a little humanity, tell the truth about what you did to my sister.” He also asked what Dominique had done to his son, Nathan, who had filed a complaint of sexual assault, which was eventually dismissed.

“Nothing!” Dominique said.

“My sister is fighting a battle,” David went on. “And I want to tell her that we will always be there for her.” He said, “For me, this trial—and I hope you won’t hold it against me, Mom, because you are the main victim—is the trial of an entire family.”

Florian took the stand next and said, “I believe Caroline, just as I believe Nathan, without the slightest doubt.” He also said he wasn’t sure that Dominique was really his father. He had been born around the time that Gisèle was having her affair, which lasted three years. “I don’t look like my brother and sister,” he said. “And I was probably the one who had the least in common with my father.”

Camus, one of Gisèle’s lawyers, asked Florian if he thought that his mother’s affair—and the possibility that he was an illegitimate son—were connected to his father’s crimes, perhaps inducing in Dominique some sort of displaced drive for revenge. Florian turned to his father. “Am I the motive?” he asked.

“Absolutely not,” Dominique said.

When Gisèle spoke, she pushed back on David’s framing of the issues at stake. “This is not a trial of family affairs, but that of Monsieur Pelicot and the fifty other people behind me,” she said.

In his closing statement, Babonneau acknowledged the family rupture that had become palpable in the courtroom. “To those who wonder about the repercussions of rape committed within a family, I say, Look at the Pelicot family.” They had been “confronted with the impossible dilemma,” he said. “How to make suffering coexist.”

Louise Colcombet, a reporter for Le Parisien who has published a graphic novel about the trial, told me, “People started asking, ‘Who is the good victim? Is it Gisèle or Caroline?’ ” In the popular imagination, it seemed that Caroline was unsettling what had become an inspirational narrative about dignity and truth. Colcombet felt that question itself revealed “what incest does to a family.”

The case was decided by a panel of five judges, and they found all the defendants guilty. Fifty were sentenced to prison terms of between three and fifteen years; Dominique received twenty, the maximum punishment. In his final statement, he praised Gisèle’s courage. “I have an inner shame,” he said, “a shell that I created, because without a shell you die.” (The two cold cases from the nineties have not yet gone to trial.)

A few of the defendants seemed transformed. Three said that they had given up sex. An I.T. specialist quoted a phrase that Gisèle had used at the start of the trial: “Shame will have to change sides.” “I was your tormenter—I need that to be heard, to be said,” he told her. “I take your shame upon myself, Madame!”

Three months after the trial ended, Caroline filed a new police complaint. She accused Dominique of drugging and raping her, citing details that had not been discussed at trial, including an erased folder on her father’s computer called “my naked daughter” and Skype exchanges in which he referred to his daughter being “trapped.” (Dominique did not respond to a request for comment on the complaint.) On the same day, she published her account of the trial, “Pour Que l’On Se Souvienne” (“So That We Remember”), which hasn’t been translated into English. In her first book, she had disowned her father; in this one, she seems to be testing the possibility of doing the same to her mother. She refers to her as both “mom” and “Gisèle,” at one point calling her “his wife.”

The next month, Time named Gisèle one of the hundred most influential people in the world. Not long afterward, she was named a knight of the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest civic honor. Queen Camilla wrote her a letter of praise, and there was a petition, signed by nearly two hundred thousand people, to award her the Nobel Peace Prize. Caroline and David stopped speaking to her. “Our mother knows our traumas very well, but she doesn’t react when she sees her own daughter suffering in court,” David told me. “So we can talk about dignity, we can talk about armor or protection, but in any case I still experienced things alongside my sister that were extremely difficult to live with, namely, her lack of recognition.” David’s son, Nathan, who is twenty, hasn’t seen Gisèle or spoken with her since the trial. “It’s true that it’s been complicated, but she has my phone number,” he said.

Caroline had founded a charity devoted to supporting victims of drug-facilitated violence, and, as she gave interviews about the charity and her second memoir, she became increasingly vocal about her sense of betrayal. In a radio interview last March, she described how her mother didn’t have the “psychological and emotional capacity to recognize” incest: “It’s not that she doesn’t want to, but she can’t.” By August, she was less understanding. “She did not fulfill her contract with me,” she told the Telegraph. “You remain a mother until you die, no matter the trials and tribulations, but she did not.”

“Oh, wait. Here it is.”

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Perhaps there had always been some disagreement about the terms of that contract—Caroline, whose emotions had always been close to the surface, wanted a kind of nurturing that Gisèle couldn’t readily give. Such tension may be enough to doom any relationship, but, after the revelation of Dominique’s crimes, it took on new weight, as if two versions of feminism were clashing. Instead of being there for maternal consolation, ready to believe and affirm, Gisèle prioritized her own emotional integrity, becoming a triumphant figure of reclaimed agency for the world. On a French podcast last year, Caroline reflected on a similar realignment in her sense of identity: her advocacy work had “shifted the balance” in her availability to her son. “It’s not that I feel less like a mother,” she said, “but I need to fulfill myself in other ways. I can’t explain it, but I think that I had such a hard time . . . breaking free from this paternal image—it’s insurmountable.” Her son was the most important person in her life, she said, but “everything can’t be limited to that for me, because I know how much it hurts when it ends.”

Florian stayed close with his mother, talking to her almost every day. He tried to be the link between Gisèle and his siblings, but he said that eventually David and Caroline cut off contact with him, too. “They asked me to choose: Are you with your mother or with us?” he said. “And you can’t ask me to choose. It’s unnatural.” (David said that he did not see it in these terms.)

Florian is now waiting for judicial authorization for a paternity test, a process that he expects will take a year. “From a psychological point of view, things would more easily align for me in relation to the feelings I’ve had since I was a little boy,” he told me when I met him at his house, in Brive-la-Gaillarde, a town in southwest France. I assumed that Florian might think of the paternity test as an escape hatch, a release from his genetic inheritance. Caroline and David now called their father Dominique or “that man,” but Florian, who actually had a way out, still called him Dad. He didn’t think that the news would bring him relief, because “he will always be my father,” Florian said. “He’s the one who loved and cared for me. That’s it.”

Gisèle began work on her book three months after the trial ended. Judith Perrignon, a journalist and a novelist who has helped several prominent French figures write their memoirs, made several trips to Île de Ré, staying at Gisèle’s house as they talked through her memories. When Perrignon told her friends that she was going back to Île de Ré, she said, they would wish her good luck in a grave tone, as if she were undertaking a dark and gruelling journey. She corrected them, laughing: “No, it’s nice. It’s nice.” Gisèle was buoyant, generous, and fun.

“A Hymn to Life” was completed in nine months and is being published simultaneously in twenty-two languages. To promote the book, Gisèle met with roughly two journalists every weekday for three weeks. I met her, at her agent’s office in Paris, on the third day of her press schedule. She looked radiant. Jean-Loup, a tanned, handsome man wearing a tweed blazer with elbow patches, was sitting beside her, carrying a shopping bag from Gerard Darel, a Parisian designer brand. He had a journal with notes on the timing of her appointments. He got up and kissed her goodbye.

When the trial began, Gisèle appeared to be a well-groomed, tasteful older lady. Now she had the bearing of a movie star. She wore tall, sleek, black leather boots, a checkered skirt, and two gold necklaces of different lengths. She sat very still and answered all my questions graciously, at a remove. At one point, she remarked, “I think anger and hatred destroy everything. I prefer to remain dignified and keep my distance. That’s just the way I am, really.” The only time she seemed more at ease was when I asked her about her stepmother, the one family member in her book about whom she expresses uncomplicated anger. She depicts a figure reminiscent of the stepmother in “Hansel and Gretel”—possessive of her husband, disdainful of his children. “She took the tree but not the fruit,” she said, laughing.

After the conversation, we went to lunch with Jean-Loup, who had been sitting in the lobby during our interview. As Gisèle entered the restaurant, a woman at a table mouthed to the person next to her, “It’s Gisèle!” Another person tried to secretly take a photo.

I asked Jean-Loup if he had been intimidated when he’d met Gisèle, because of her “baggage,” as one could call it. He said, “I don’t know what happened, but—”

“There’s a connection,” Gisèle said, putting her index fingers together like a tent.

“We didn’t even ask ourselves the question,” he said.

“It was obvious,” Gisèle said.

“It was obvious that we should build something together,” he agreed. He added, “If I met her today, I wouldn’t dare approach her. Luckily, I knew her before.”

As the trial had progressed, Gisèle became bolder in the way she framed the case and her desire to “change our patriarchal, sexist society,” as she had put it on the day of the verdict. I asked Jean-Loup if the trial had changed his vocabulary, too. “I hang on to her every word,” he said. “I completely agree with her. We’re both on the same page.” She looked at him and tenderly laughed.

“I prefer to remain dignified and keep my distance,” Gisèle said.Photograph by Melanie & Ramon for The New Yorker

Jean-Loup told me, tearing up, “For me, the best part of her book is at the end of the last chapter, when she tells the whole world that she loves me.”

Gisèle pulled his arm closer and kissed his hand. “You’re with me,” she said. “He’s my duet.”

They had recently been on a trip to Brazil, and after her book tour they were going to Tahiti with friends. I found the phrase “living her best life” sneaking, confusingly, into my head. What has a century of psychological theory taught us if not to be suspicious of happiness in the wake of trauma? But all those theories now seemed sort of miserly.

Gisèle told me that, in December, she and Caroline had taken steps toward reconciling. “I think we both needed to distance ourselves to perhaps heal in different ways,” she said. There had been a phone conversation before Christmas, and another on Caroline’s birthday, in January. As the publication date approached, they began talking every day. But David and Florian spoke of the reconciliation tentatively, as something necessary but maybe not possible, especially now that Gisèle—the “ultimate victim,” as Babonneau put it in court—was becoming even more of a public symbol.

Gisèle’s children had not yet read the memoir, and they were not interviewed for it. Perrignon told me that Gisèle hoped the book might repair her relationships with them. In the memoir, Gisèle writes that the photos of Caroline reveal an “unbearable incestuous gaze”—a phrase that reads like a new offering to her daughter—and expresses sorrow that, without proof, Caroline is forced to live in a state of doubt. She also acknowledges that her psychological defenses must have registered to Caroline as a lack of concern. “I wanted to help her now, but I didn’t know what to do or how to reach her,” she writes. “I embraced silence, she demanded noise.”

In their memoirs, both women describe the moment when they left the courthouse after the verdict. Gisèle was escorted by police officers and surrounded by women chanting her name. A banner on a wall outside the courthouse read “Merci Gisèle.” It is theoretically a triumphant moment, but both mother and daughter seem to recognize that the public has rewarded only one form of surviving. As Gisèle got into a car with Jean-Loup and her lawyers, she writes, “I lost sight of my children and grandchildren in the tussle.” Caroline watched them get into the car. “My brothers and I stayed on the sidewalk and walked alone, dejected and silent,” she writes. ♦

On his podcast “This Is Gavin Newsom,” the Democratic governor of California has made it a goal to rigorously engage with the opposition. But he is acceding, appeasing, as he nods and “mm-hmm”s in response to guests such as Steve Bannon and Ben Shapiro, ideologues who come on the show to discuss the machinations of MAGA. And so the podcast’s producers, perhaps intuiting that the dialogue experiment with conservatives is failing, occasionally slot in friendlier agents of power, Hollywood types, with whom Newsom can discuss the finer points of things like tax incentives to film in the state of California.

Last summer, Newsom interviewed the television producer and showrunner Ryan Murphy, a beneficiary of the California Film Commission’s tax-credit program. Showrunner is a scant identifier for Murphy, who, next to Taylor Sheridan and possibly Tyler Perry, cuts, rather, the figure of a streaming imperialist, endlessly iterating formulaic soaps about gender and power in the country. On the podcast, Newsom asked Murphy about the upcoming entrant in his “Love Story” anthology series—there are also the “American Crime Story” and “American Horror Stories” series—which would detail the relationship of John F. Kennedy, Jr., and Carolyn Bessette, America’s son and his bride, who died in a plane crash just off the shore of Martha’s Vineyard, in 1999. The two were cremated and had their ashes scattered in the Atlantic, an unreachable grave site, which intensified the irrational feeling that the couple had disappeared on some journey—where to, we don’t know.

At one point during the interview, Newsom brings up Jack Schlossberg, the thirty-three-year-old son of Caroline Kennedy, J.F.K., Jr.,’s sister. Murphy can barely conceal his resentment of what he perceives as a sort of aristocratic entitlement. The public found the adult Schlossberg during the pandemic years, seizing on his Instagram, where he proved himself to be completely literate in the language of internet absurdism. His wise-clown personality came as a shock, in part because of the legion of mythologized men he resembled. He skewered the veneration of his own family, too, later asking his followers on X whether Usha Vance, the Second Lady, was “hotter” than Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, his grandmother. The line crossed, the kid cowed, he was now getting more serious, acting like the scion in the headlines. (He is now running for Congress in New York.) After “Love Story” was announced, Schlossberg accused Murphy of profiting off his family’s tragedy “in a grotesque way.” Murphy’s response, on Newsom’s podcast, was amazingly mean. He thought it was an “odd choice to be mad about your relative that you really don’t remember.” Afterward, Schlossberg exploded, citing childhood memories of his uncle—the given nickname of Jackolantern; his uncle driving a Pontiac convertible and picking him up from school.

Ownership of the Kennedy story is a war with many combatants. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in 1963, Jacqueline, alert with a widow’s sense of history management, spun in Life magazine the myth of Camelot. The tabloids go occult, explaining death after death through the logic of the Kennedy curse. The family’s confidants, real and imagined, insist on both their normalcy and their otherworldly grace. The gossips leak letters indicating the family’s ruthlessness. The aesthetes (the writer Wayne Koestenbaum, the director Pablo Larraín) expel the Kennedy men from consideration, focussing instead on Jackie, with her scarlet letter “O.” Of the hagiographers, the dozens of them, the story is Greek tragedy, the hero fated to doom, a narrative lifted from Robert F. Kennedy himself, famous reciter of Aeschylus in grief at the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., just two months before his own assassination. The critical biographers, perhaps none as trenchantly as Garry Wills, the author of “The Kennedy Imprisonment,” published in 1982, remind us that, as Attorney General during his brother’s Administration, Robert Kennedy gave the green light for J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap King’s phones. The credo of politics without values that was forged: the Wills strain of psychoanalytic history, beginning with a deep reading of Joseph Kennedy, the patriarch, an Irish Catholic who makes a fortune pooling stocks and then works out his reprisal against the Boston Brahmin class that rejected him through his relentless elevation of his sons—this is not the story that sticks.

The book cited as the source for Murphy’s new series—Elizabeth Beller’s “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy”—was published in 2024. What’s the reason for this one? In the scrum of literature about the Kennedys and their satellites, the wives, saddled with the heavy work of making the family grow, Beller’s book is guileless. Its premise is that Bessette, an outsider in the family, deserves for her reputation to be reclaimed. It’s a corrective spree: she was not a Wasp from Greenwich; she and her two sisters were raised Catholic by their single mother, an Italian American, in White Plains. The move to Connecticut came later, and Bessette also worked throughout her teen-age years. According to Beller, Bessette’s relationship with J.F.K., Jr.—which was often depicted in the press as tumultuous, with the tabloids marking Bessette as a vixen, an opportunist, a bitch—had its ordinary stresses magnified by the swarm of paparazzi around the couple, a form of stalking that destroyed Bessette’s mental health. Nearly every source—the schoolteacher, the childhood classmate, the colleague at Calvin Klein, where she eventually worked—praises Bessette as unnaturally gorgeous, socially canny, quick-witted, generous, compassionate, etc. Hounded by the tabloids in New York City, hazed by the Kennedys at the compound in Hyannis, she was in agony at the end of her life, Beller posits, having relinquished her agency to meet the burden of being loved by John and the hellish public scrutiny that came with his affection. In sum, he Beller biography gives Bessette the familiar Princess Diana interpretive treatment.

Schlossberg was not by any means alone in shading the Murphy show while it was in production. C.B.K., as she is called, is the love object of a posthumous legion of admirers. They are more than admirers, though. They are custodians of the myth. Bessette refused the profile at Vogue or Harper’s; the custodians do not have a lot of material to work with. But they’ve done plenty of work anyway, and what makes Beller’s book seem belated—gratuitous—is the already well-established, loosely connected school of bloggers, mimics, and lay analysts of Bessette’s public footprint, namely her minimalist nineties style. Their Bessette is a creature of photography. Even in the famous paparazzi shots of Bessette and J.F.K., Jr., squabbling in Washington Square Park, they see an opportunity for aesthetic analysis. The scan of the proportion of the camel-colored pencil skirt, the break on the bootleg jean, the wear on the spazzolato bag—these have all become points for divining the intelligence and savvy of Bessette. Most anachronistically, some recruit Bessette as an avatar for so-called quiet luxury and clean-girl aesthetics, recent trends that are expressions not of individual personality but of discernment and discipline turned menacingly inward. And so the custodians became irate when photographs emerged of the actor Sarah Pidgeon, who plays Bessette in Murphy’s show, looking all wrong on set. The chief affront was the hair: too yellow, far from C.B.K.’s ice-blond. The critiques were heard, Murphy told Newsom; Pidgeon, a brunette then wearing a wig, was ultimately forced to bleach. “Bessette is loved as a mute,” a friend summarized to me over drinks, the other night.

The show had its première party in New York City in early February. The Times’ Styles section did its glossy treatment of the night, which struck a familiar tone. The wish in a certain class of creative professionals today is to resuscitate the shift in the atmosphere of the nineties, that clash of the louche and the classed, the first gentrifications of downtown—impossible in the fully corporatized Manhattan of today. This cohort has too much money, too many brand sponsorships—this cohort has Instagram. Pidgeon and her John, the actor Paul Anthony Kelly, dressed respectively in the slip and in the suit, were styled to look like dolls of the real couple. The party was held at the Pool, the seafood den in midtown, where prop copies of George, the pop-culture-meets-politics magazine started by J.F.K., Jr., were fanned out on glass tables. George is currently extant in a horrific form; the trademark having been bought by a conspiracy-theorist lawyer some years ago. But that, and the degradation it represents, was allowed no oxygen in that chrome room.

Eight of the nine episodes of “Love Story” were made available for review. How Murphy and Connor Hines, the creator, handle the tragedy of the plane crash, an accident sometimes narrativized as more than the result of thick fog but the culmination of an inherited arrogance, remains to be seen. They will have to strain for good taste there. Otherwise, the tone of the show is pure cosmopolitan sympathy. So much of “Love Story” is forgettable, because the Wikipedia-page-like narrowness on the doomed romance excises all that contemporary drama—President Bill Clinton invoking J.F.K. as a forefather, Ted Kennedy, the brother of J.F.K. and R.F.K., recovering from the scandal of Chappaquiddick and the humiliation of a failed Presidential run to become the “lion” of the Senate—that makes the Kennedy story, one of a relationship to a greater culture, so compelling. One can’t subsist on the restaging of fights in the park alone! Ultimately, it is Pidgeon’s Bessette that stays with you, because she feels like an invention, an injection of an idea and a rejection of the sphinx one. Hines and Pidgeon give the woman a choreography, the dramatic toss of the hair, the hips gone concave, the Marlboro rasp in her voice. When we lose her verve, in later episodes, we feel more viscerally the first tragedy, which was how her marriage wrecked her life.

The show, a sort of elegy for Gen X, opens with a flash-forward to July 16, 1999, the final hours of Carolyn and John. On the tarmac, the lovers crouch, pressing their foreheads together, as if knowledgeable about their impending end. The early episodes are mostly devoted to filling out Bessette’s downtown existence, her professional and social world at Calvin Klein, where she is a star in the universe of the designer, who is played with spice by Alessandro Nivola. The show is a self-conscious fashion story; it gives off that defensive and wounded self-importance of some fashion people, their craft relegated on some psychological level to service work, in comparison to the arts or politics. You don’t need to understand that a siege was under way then, that Klein and Donna Karan and other provocative Americans were poised to go “uptown” to bring sex and skin to Madison Avenue, overtaking the old-money élites. Carolyn is a working girl with a budget. Before she meets John, she has a boy toy, Michael Bergin (who in real life wrote a dishy book about their “situationship,” to use the modern parlance). She is a picture of East Village resourcefulness. She lives in a world of images, of fashion, which certainly comes with its own set of politics.

Paul Anthony Kelly’s John, when we meet him, has his Bouvier bouffant stuffed under backward Kangols and baseball caps, riding his bike around Tribeca as if it were a steed. Kelly is much too recalcitrant or reverent of an actor to get at the root of Kennedy’s sexual appeal, his swagger, but at least he does look the part. The acting mandate was evidently to go puppy. There should be more grit in the story, which is too rhythmically indebted to the swoon beats of “Bridgerton.” The show invents the initial meeting to be like Cinderella crashing the ball. Carolyn sneaks into a gala; Klein, the fairy godmother, introduces her to the instantly besotted prince, John. In the annals, Kennedy and Bessette met at the Calvin Klein offices—her turf, not his—a scene that Hines recreates soon after as a domination ritual, Carolyn with pen in mouth, taking John’s measurements, as he poses in amused ecstasy. He thinks he knows his waist size—thirty-three. She corrects him. What else doesn’t he know about himself? Is there a self to know?

The political dynasty is not guaranteed a future. The fitness of the second and third generations is threatened by the very privilege they are born into. The unknowable father looms over John. The mother, meanwhile, is dying quietly in the penthouse at 1040 Fifth Avenue. (Naomi Watts was fun as the socialite Babe Paley in another Murphy property. Here, as Jackie O., she is a camp disaster.) Grace Gummer plays Caroline, J.F.K., Jr.,’s burdened sister, a sort of embodied critique of Kennedy playboy masculinity. Her brother is teetering on becoming a failson. When he can’t pass the bar exam, the New York Daily News relishes in wordplay—“The Hunk Flunks.”

The John of this show is like a love junkie; he needs women to fuel his pursuits, such as George. “Love Story” slavishly wants to get the interpretation “right” in painting the family not as a patriarchy but as an institution in which the women ruled, to set up the intrusion of Carolyn. In one of the few scenes to express any curiosity about Kennedy liberalism, Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Robert, orchestrates a dinner-table game in Hyannis in which the youngest generation must give their “thoughts” on the trade embargo with Cuba. Politicking as a nasty parlor game is Carolyn’s introduction to the Kennedys.

Things have to happen for the couple to happen. The show is good at making the off-and-on vicissitudes of modern dating feel natural to the plot. The mother has to die. The pair has to dump their former lovers. Dree Hemingway (yes, that Hemingway) plays poor Daryl Hannah, whom J.F.K., Jr., was dating when he met Bessette, like she is a ghost, the representative “blonde” and “actress” for whom three generations of Kennedys demonstrated a ravenous appetite—Gloria Swanson and Marilyn Monroe coming before her. The actresses, almost like a gender, in the Kennedy story, know, to some degree, what kind of public attention to expect. The tension in Hines’s version lies in Bessette’s refusal to conform to the role. Kelly’s emotional two-dimensionality increases our anger on behalf of Pidgeon’s Carolyn, a vibrant professional woman who sees her life and her career toxified by the paparazzi and the press. She is trying to shake her man awake to the danger. There is a part of John that likes the attention. But he is alarmed to see Carolyn losing her spark, after they marry, their Tribeca loft becoming her tomb. Even so, he never truly considers leaving his cage.

So the eighth episode overdoes the whole “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” thing. It is August of 1997. Diana of Wales dies. In the compressed timeline of the show, her death has a foreboding placement, as if on the eve of the crash near the Cape. Carolyn is glued to the television, immediately identifying with the princess in the Mercedes-Benz; John can’t take her obsessing. The relationship is crumbling. He goes out for a run and returns. The two erupt in argument, in misunderstanding, with John confessing his anger at his lot. He’s no Prince Harry or William; his whole life has been colored by the threat of murder, accident, illness, assassination. The episode ends. And then the tale moves toward its ordained ending. ♦

Early in my freshman year of college, a speeding car struck my twin brother, Jim, on a street near our campus. These were pre-cellphone days, but I happened to be in my dorm room when the call came in, so I got to ride with my brother in the ambulance. Our sister, Alice, who was in the year ahead of us, soon arrived at the hospital.

Shortly after the orderlies wheeled Jim away to be intubated, an intensive-care doctor explained to me and Alice that our brother was suffering from acute respiratory failure. This man, whom we’d never seen before, casually added that Jim was unlikely to make it to morning. Then he continued on his rounds. The first thing we did, once he’d left, was pray.

We’d been raised in a devout Catholic home, attending Mass every Sunday and on holy days of obligation, saying grace before meals, prayers before bed, and rosaries on long car rides, constantly adding sick or troubled loved ones to our intentions list. At the hospital, praying together was a distraction, but it was also an act that we believed to have some power to help our brother live through the night.

As it happens, he did live through it. His recovery was long—months stretching into years—but ultimately complete. I thanked God for that. But the memory of that first night, when I thought I was losing him forever, stayed with me. The recognition of radical human vulnerability pushes some people toward belief, but for me it had the opposite effect. On campus that spring, I started skipping Mass. This proved to be the initial step on a path that eventually led to my rejection of the faith in which I’d been raised. An answered prayer made me an atheist.

In many ways, those years—the turn of the twenty‑first century—were an ideal time to be a budding unbeliever. In 2004, an unknown writer named Sam Harris published “The End of Faith,” a short polemic on the existential threat that religion posed to Western civilization. In rapid succession, Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” (2006), Daniel Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell” (2006), and Christopher Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great” (2007) followed Harris’s book onto best-seller lists, and the so-called Four Horsemen became the public face of a resurgent New Atheism. But I quickly discovered that I was not the audience for these books. I wasn’t looking to talk my way out of a belief in God—I was already out. I wanted to know what to believe in instead.

If I was still in search of beliefs, many atheists would object, I hadn’t really gotten over my religious upbringing. A good atheist deals not in faith but in facts, not in belief but in knowledge. Yet I could find no obvious factual, knowledge-based answer to the question that was most pressing to me: How am I to live?

I don’t mean to suggest that the New Atheists had no moral sense. On the contrary, they were largely fuelled by moral outrage at the needless suffering religion caused. But the nature of morality was seemingly the only thing about which they did not care to argue. They thought it simply self‑evident that we desire pleasure over pain for ourselves, and that any decent person wished the same for others. One of religion’s greatest harms, they believed, was that it turned people away from this basic intuition. Of the Four Horsemen, only Harris aspired to a “science of good and evil” which could subject moral claims to the same rational scrutiny as all other claims, but his chapter on the topic quickly devolves into an argument about the indefensibility of pacifism and the moral necessity of government torture. (It was a strange time.)

Anyway, I wasn’t really looking for practical guidance. To ask “How am I to live?” is to inquire as to not just what is right but what is good. It is to ask not just “What should I do?” but “How should I be?” The most generous interpretation of the New Atheist view on this question is that people ought to have the freedom to decide for themselves. On that, I agreed completely, but that left me right where I’d started, still in need of an answer.

Setting down the popular polemics of the day, I began to read modern philosophy, which I understood to be the primary means by which humans have sought secular answers to life’s questions. I read the philosophers most frequently cited as models by modern‑day atheists—John Locke, David Hume, John Stuart Mill—as well as those whom meaning‑hungry young people habitually embrace as secular gurus: Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albert Camus. But I also read philosophers who are mostly read just by other philosophers.

Even when I was struggling with the most challenging of these works, the reading felt urgent to me. I wasn’t submitting papers or getting grades; I wasn’t looking to earn a degree or to pursue a career. I wasn’t even trying to impress people at literary parties. (For that, I had thousand‑page postmodern novels.) I was just trying to figure things out. Immanuel Kant’s three “critiques” are often cited as the works that first made philosophy inaccessible to nonspecialists, but in Kant’s opinion he was addressing very straightforward questions—What can I know?, What must I do?, and What may I hope? I was decidedly a nonspecialist, and these were the questions I wanted answered.

Among other things, this reading taught me that atheists do hold beliefs, not just about morals and ethics but about how the world actually is and how humans fit into it. Of course, not all atheists hold the same beliefs—just as not all theists do—but I found that modern atheist belief tends to cluster into two broad traditions.

The most prevalent atheist world view goes by many names—empiricism, positivism, physicalism, naturalism—but the term that best captures the fullness of its present‑day iteration, as I see it, is scientific materialism. Roughly speaking, this view holds that the material world is all that exists, that humans can know this world through sense perception, that the methods of science allow us to convert the raw data of these perceptions into general principles, and that these principles can be both tested and put to practical use by making predictions about future events.

As world views go, scientific materialism has a lot to say for it. It tells us that humans are capable, without any supernatural aid, of coming to understand, and ultimately to master, all of reality. It tells us that the store of human knowledge is constantly increasing and continuously improving our material conditions. To this end, it points to the astonishing human progress that has occurred in the time of science’s reign. And it encourages us to enjoy the fruits of this progress as much as possible, since our life here on earth is the only one we’ll get.

Most people who subscribe to scientific materialism take it to be so obviously correct that it could not be denied by any rational person who truly understood it. But my reading showed me that this world view has its shortcomings. The most basic is perhaps inherent to any world view at all: it rests on a set of principles which often can’t be proven, even by the standards of proof the world view embraces. The general principle that all real knowledge is derived from sense perception of material facts cannot itself be derived from the perception of facts in the world, and thus can’t really be sanctioned by scientific materialism’s own methods. Indeed, no general principle can be. The very legitimacy of deriving general principles from the particulars of experience can never be established from experience without already having the principle in hand.

This so-called problem of induction was first identified not by any counter-Enlightenment reactionary but by the Scottish empiricist David Hume. Earlier empiricists like Locke and Francis Bacon believed that the physical sciences should still be grounded partly in metaphysical belief. Hume became one of modern atheism’s great intellectual heroes by rejecting this idea. But he didn’t substitute some other foundation in its place. Instead, he argued that we should simply do without foundations entirely, apart from the rather shaky ones of custom, habit, and expedience. That has been more or less the scientific-materialist answer to the problem ever since: scientific materialism just works.

If by “works” one means that it can be put to good use, this is unquestionably so. But, if we mean that it captures within its frame all the notable features of our experience, that’s a different matter. In fact, what materialism can’t adequately capture is experience itself. Consciousness is not material, not publicly available through sense perception, not subject to the kind of observation that scientific materialism takes as the hallmark of knowledge. By the standards of the materialist world view, it simply doesn’t exist. For me, this limitation proved fatal. I spent far too much time within the confines of my mind to accept a world view that told me whatever was going on in there wasn’t real.

Luckily, I’d by then come into contact with the other great family of modern atheist belief, which I eventually came to call romantic idealism. This is the atheism of Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger and their existentialist descendants, which begins in precisely the place where scientific materialism leaves off, with the will of the subjective, conscious agent. At its most extreme, romantic idealism treats each of us as willing our own world into being, creating the reality in which we live. Even when it does not go quite this far, it treats our subjective experience as the proper subject of knowledge, in fact the only thing we can ever be said to know.

Romantic idealism arose in the post‑Enlightenment era, and it grew in opposition to the principles of Enlightenment rationality as much as it did to religious authority. Although atheism is often associated with hyperrationality, this form of it is unapologetically irrational. In place of reason, observation, and scientific study, it valorizes emotion, imagination, and artistic creativity. The ethics of romantic idealism are an ethics of authenticity: the greatest good is not maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain but living in a way that is true to our subjective reality. The movement rejects religious belief not for being empirically false but for being a ready‑made and inherited response to existential problems that we must work out for ourselves. The appeal of this world view—particularly for a young person engaged in just such a working out—should be obvious, and I soon found myself in thrall to it.

Like scientific materialism, romantic idealism does not have a solid foundation in any provable universal truth. But it revels in this condition: it is the lack of any such foundation that makes it possible for each of us to construct our own truth. This relativism carries clear dangers. Since the time of Locke, empiricism has been closely linked with political liberalism, whereas romantic idealism is associated with rather darker political forces. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the founders of Romanticism, was a great inspiration for the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. He argued that liberalism’s supposed universal rights were covers for bourgeois self-interest. This argument was later developed at great length by Nietzsche, one of several thinkers in this tradition who inspired the rise of fascism.

A more basic problem with romantic idealism occurs on the personal level: building meaning from scratch turns out to be an incredibly difficult task. The romantic-idealist approach is fraught with fear and trembling, a fact it doesn’t deny. It is not a route to happiness; indeed, it seems to hold the goal of happiness in contempt. (“Mankind does not strive for happiness,” Nietzsche wrote. “Only the Englishman does that.”) Many romantic-idealist writers have been fascinated by the “problem” of suicide—the problem, in their view, being that there’s no good reason not to do it.

It was this element of romantic idealism which finally led to my rejection of it. I grew tired of being unhappy and anxious all the time, of constantly questioning whether life was worth the trouble. One cause of the feeling, for me, was that the materialists had it right on an important point: there is, indeed, a world outside our heads that cannot be ignored or overpowered through force of will, and denying this is a recipe for misery.

After nearly twenty years of searching unsuccessfully for a livable atheist world view, I began, in my mid-thirties, to entertain the possibility that atheism itself might be part of the problem. There were many steps from here to my eventual return to robust belief, but I started with the notion that for me the authentic life might be one of faith—one that recognized the existence of both the external material world and the internal ideational world and sought to reconcile them, and one that accepted an absolute foundation to things and attempted to understand, in some provisional and imperfect way, the nature of this foundation and what it wanted from me.

Roughly a decade has now passed since my return to theistic belief. Barring some extreme change, this second period of faith will soon have lasted longer than my years of atheist wandering. Yet those years will always be with me, and I’m grateful for them. They have made me understand the world around me, one lately marked by sorrow and despair, in a radically different way than I would have otherwise.

The signal predicament of our era is the global rise of illiberalism and intolerance. Secular liberals who have observed these forces with quite justified horror have often linked them to a familiar enemy: religion. In their view, Christian nationalism is one of the primary ideologies behind right‑wing illiberalism. Meanwhile, they tend to see the strain of left‑wing thought which rejects universalist liberal principles as equally under the sway of a kind of faith—the “cult” or “Church” of identity politics. (Richard Dawkins, of “The God Delusion,” speaks for many of them when he declared “woke” to be a “latter‑day Torquemadism . . . with its own religiously enforced dogma.”)

“Religion” is a famously malleable sociological category, but, if we stick to the criterion of theistic belief, the argument that modern‑day illiberalism is primarily a religious movement does not really hold up. Perhaps the crudest way to make the point would be simply to note that the rise of illiberalism has gone hand in hand with a decline of theistic belief and religious practice—both in the United States and around the world. The avatar of American illiberalism, Donald Trump, is the first President in generations who does not even pretend to be influenced or motivated by Christian faith. Trump is best understood as our first Nietzschean President, a man who explicitly embraces the will to power as the ultimate value, a force to which even the truth must give way.

Many of the young and highly educated cohorts who populate the portions of the left most suspicious of universal liberal values are also among those least likely to identify as religious believers. In a different manner than Trump, they hold that so-called objective “truths” are the expression of power dynamics—tools used by the élite to oppress the marginalized. In place of these truths, they champion the importance of identity and authenticity. In other words, large groups of both the left and the right have become romantic idealists, and they have come to pose the same challenge to liberalism and scientific rationalism that romantic idealism has always posed to these traditions.

Meanwhile, the failure of these traditions to respond adequately to the challenge is bound up with the problem identified by their earliest proponents: they have a very hard time articulating their foundational justification. When liberalism runs smoothly, it does a remarkable job delivering the goods it promises. For most people, this is a sufficient achievement to quiet any worries about its philosophical underpinnings. But when many people within liberal societies do not feel that the system is working, when the practical case for liberalism comes into question, secular liberals don’t have much else to go on.

For early liberals like Locke, it seemed obvious that liberalism—like empiricism—needed to be grounded in faith, even as it sought to enshrine tolerance for different varieties of belief. For Locke, the fact that we have immortal souls subject to eternal punishment and reward means that it’s irrational to submit to a government that denies God’s will as we understand it, no matter how much coercive power that government has. At the same time, Locke had the empiricist’s healthy suspicion that we could never have metaphysical certainty about what the Creator’s will was, which meant that no person should impose his answer to that question on another. It is for these reasons that faith must be treated as a matter of personal conscience, but also more generally that a regime grounded in a social contract must be one that respects individual freedoms. Our status as creatures of God confers on us certain rights that can’t be handed over as part of the social contract, rights that are at once natural and inalienable.

Many of the Founding Fathers held this same view. But, after Hume, liberals came increasingly to find even the barest invocation of metaphysical principles to be an embarrassment. The great post-Humean liberal theorist Jeremy Bentham called the idea of natural rights “nonsense,” and the idea of inalienable natural rights “nonsense on stilts.” Some liberals have tried to hold on to such abstract concepts without the metaphysical framework in which they make sense, but many eventually came to the Humean conclusion that liberalism could simply do without foundations, so long as it got the job done.

My own passage into and back out of unbelief—one marked by a close reading of works that earlier illiberal societies had attempted to suppress on religious grounds—has strengthened my liberal commitments. But it’s also made me acutely aware of liberalism’s very real limitations. As a means for allowing people with different conceptions of the good to live together fruitfully and peacefully, liberalism seems unmatched in human history. As a means of generating its own conceptions of goodness that feel compelling to most human beings, its record is quite mixed, perhaps because that’s not what it was ever designed to do.

What’s more, when liberals treat some version of scientific materialism as so self-evidently true that it must serve as the default context for public discourse; when they make allegiance to “reason” and “evidence,” as they define these terms, the price of admission into such discourse; and when they attempt to banish metaphysical or spiritual or even frankly religious talk from our politics and our culture, they are not practicing liberalism as its greatest exemplars understood it. They are eliminating from our shared vocabulary many of the concepts on which any justification for liberalism beyond the purely practical would have to depend.

I am not suggesting that the solution to our problems is for secular liberals to find God. But I am suggesting that religious believers be considered natural allies in the fight against irrational illiberalism, rather than its primary cause. This need not mean abandoning secularism, and it certainly doesn’t mean abandoning liberalism. It means, perhaps, seeing liberalism as so many liberals wish believers would see their faith: not as the expression of a universal truth to which every person must eventually submit but as a human construction—one of the finest we have ever made—worth defending even when it is helpless to defend itself, yet capable of being swept away by the same hands that built it in the first place. ♦

This is drawn from “Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer.”

The eighty-five-year-old photographer Arthur Tress has had a long and busy career, but the photographs that continue to define him are from the nineteen-seventies. Most of them are oddly charged, dramatically staged images meant to evoke dreams, nightmares, or fantasies. Many of the best-known photos from a series with children, published in 1972 as “The Dream Collector,” could be frames from a David Lynch film. Much of the subsequent work Tress made was similarly theatrical but tended to involve homoerotic scenes. In one picture, a slim teen-ager reaches over tentatively, tenderly, to peel a bandage off another boy’s bare thigh, a moment both touching and wonderfully matter-of-fact. Tress’s approach during this period recalls that of his friend and mentor Duane Michals, another maverick. Both photographers are storytellers, impatient with the limitations of the photograph as a document, and looking for ways to open it up to the imagination. Although their work with the male body anticipated more radical and more widely seen images from Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, Bruce Weber, and others, its detour into narrative tended to place it outside of any larger conversations. I remember thinking that Tress’s photography was intriguing but melodramatic and a bit overwrought. I never spent much time with it.

Tress’s new book, “The Ramble, NYC 1969” (Stanley/Barker), and a related exhibition currently at the Clamp gallery, in Chelsea, makes me rethink all this. The work was made concurrently with another series, “Open Space in the Inner City: Ecology and the Urban Environment.” The Ramble, a wooded area on the center-west side of Central Park, was its own “urban environment.” But Tress’s prime interest was in the people he found there: mostly good-looking but otherwise unremarkable young men who were passing through, standing around, and waiting. Long before Tress arrived, the Ramble was known as a place where gay men hooked up and had sex in the bushes. In 1968, when he was in his late twenties, the photographer lived at Riverside Drive and Seventy-second Street, a short walk from the Park, and, as he told the playwright Jordan Tannahill in Interview, the rocky, overgrown Ramble was “my own private cruising grounds.”

The Ramble’s ever-shifting population was more various than any gay bar’s. When Tress started taking his camera to the Park, he photographed some men “surreptitiously” but often asked first if it was O.K. For many, it wasn’t. Even if gay sex was beginning to be decriminalized at the time, a lot of the men who cruised for sex were married or closeted or otherwise on the down-low. We can’t know much about the men who did agree to be seen in Tress’s pictures, only that they comprise a small part of the population that used these paths as meeting places and hunting grounds before the sun went down. But are these photographs performances or documents? How much does Tress’s subjects’ consent compromise the “truth” of these pictures? “My work has always been a little bit of improvised, stage-directed imagery,” Tress told Tannahill. He calls it “poetic documentary.”

Even when these handsome young men are obviously posing for Tress’s camera, the work is rich and fascinating, providing a view into a world otherwise all but invisible to passersby. Tress told the writer and curator Jackson Davidow, who wrote an essay for “The Ramble,” that he’d been cruising since he was fifteen. Recalling “layers of guilt and fear” that he and others had to work through, he suggests that many of his pictures could be seen as self-portraits. So he’s especially alert to expressions of anticipation, yearning, disappointment, and the kind of loneliness that even a flash of attention can’t dispel. Some of Tress’s images are jolting, including one of a bare-chested man who appears through some thorny branches, his wide-eyed stare so intense that he looks possessed—at once sightless and a seer. Other photographs suggest sympathy or concern. In one, Tress’s subject is perched on a rock, hands clasped over his folded legs, as compact as he can be but still anxious, apprehensive. Another guy, lying on the ground in dappled sunlight, is viewed from above at a moment of unself-conscious surrender—he’s one of several subjects who looks ready to fall in love.

Such pictures provide “The Ramble” with an emotional element, but what Tress does best here is reportorial—giving us a sense of place and of ritual. Some men stop and wait to see what comes along; others keep going, always on the lookout. In many of the images, the man whom Tress has focussed on is unaware of another man nearly hidden in the foliage or on a rocky outcropping, just a few feet away—a missed connection that can seem at once poignant and comic. Tress surely recognized himself in all these men, from the saddest shrinking violet to the happy flasher with nothing under his trenchcoat but pants cut off just above the knees. But if “The Ramble” forms an extended self-portrait it also provides a mirror for its readers, queer and otherwise, navigating a world full of possibility that we don’t dare reach out and touch.

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The Washington Roundtable discusses Donald Trump’s recent “explosion of the ego” and tendency toward megalomania, and they consider how the evolution of autocratic regimes in history can help us to predict how the rest of his Presidency may unfold. They are joined by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, who is the author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” The group looks at how, as autocrats’ popularity decreases—as Trump’s has recently in the polls—these figures develop paranoia and entrench themselves in untenable positions, a phenomenon called “autocratic backfire.” “The key is that they end up constructing a kind of echo chamber. And so they overestimate their own abilities,” Ben-Ghiat says. “They start to believe their own propaganda.”

This week’s reading:

“ ‘If We Don’t Have Free Speech, Then We Just Don’t Have a Free Country,’ ” by Susan B. Glasser

“Pam Bondi’s Contempt for Congress,” by Ruth Marcus

“Is There a Remedy for Presidential Profiteering?,” by David D. Kirkpatrick

“What Does Xi Jinping Want?” by Isaac Chotiner

“Bad Bunny’s All-American Super Bowl Halftime Show,” by Kelefa Sanneh

“Jeffrey Epstein’s Bonfire of the Élites,” by John Cassidy

Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.